I teach at Lehigh University in eastern Pennsylvania. I work on British colonialism, modernism, postcolonial/global literature, and the digital humanities.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

University of California Press Puts 400 Books Online, free

I'm not 100% sure I see what's in it for them to make 400 books available to the general public, completely free. (Thanks, Bookish) But there will be time enough for analysis later. In the short run, I'm celebrating, passing it on, and hoping other presses will follow suit.

Here are some of the titles that interested me (not that I have time to actually read through many of them in the week before classes start). The books at the top of the list are generally books I've read parts of already:

7 comments:

WOW! This is great. Althoug, my guess is that these books are already available in a large number of libraries and/or don't sell a lot of copies anymore. Still, this is a nice moment for free information.

"Long tail strategy" -- at first I didn't know what you meant. But then I googled, and saw it defined at Steve Rubel's blog.

If we presume they are doing this with some commercial motive in mind, digitizing might widen the general readership and awareness of the press. It won't help them get their new books bought by libraries (it might even hurt). But it might get some non-academic niche readers and independent scholars interested in what they are putting out. If I were California Press, I would be putting text ads on the 'free pages' that would link to new California Press books on related subjects.

But it's also possible that they are doing this under the rhetorical banner of the Public Interest: scholarly materials should be widely available as a matter of principle, and no profit motive is involved.

As for the idea that all information wants to be free, I think that's a little utopian. There are different kinds of information...

Well by only showing a chapter at a time, they're making it easy to read, but harder to download and share. So it's sort of like having the book in the library or a bookstore to browse, encouraging you to buy the thing.

Having worked in a couple of academic presses, though, I'm inclined to agree with your take that there's a certain idealism going on here -- let's get these books out there since they don't sell, that sort of thing.

Links, Selected Posts

Amardeep Singh, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh UniversityOn Twitter

My book, Diaspora Vérité: The Films of Mira Nair, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2018, is now available on Amazon.

I have been working on several digital projects in Scalar. All are in progress as of January 2019.
One is digital archive I am calling "The Kiplings and India." Working with a team of graduate research assistants, we have been building the site in Scalar here. Feedback welcome; it's a work in progress.

I have also been working on a Digital Collection called "Claude McKay's Early Poetry (1912-1922)" This project began as a collaborative class project called "Harlem Echoes," a digital edition of Claude McKay's "Harlem Shadows." The new version of the project is much-expanded, including McKay's early Jamaican poetry as well as his uncollected political poetry from magazines like The Liberator and Workers Dreadnought.

I also put together a digital edition of Jean Toomer's Cane, taking advantage of the fact that that work is now in the public domain. That project can be found here.